Dan Snow (2:05)

Hi everyone. Welcome to Dan Snows history. If you explore the quayside in King's Lynn in Norfolk, you will find many beautiful buildings. But one of them I've always been particularly fond of, it's the Hanseatic warehouse. It's a herringbone brick building. You can see the timber frames. It's right there on the quayside of the Great Ouse River. And it's a reminder of a time when King's Lynn was a great port. Before the river had silted up, ocean going ships would come all the way in there and unload their cargo. And this building was one of many in Britain, a key outpost of a Remarkable commercial organization, the Hanseatic League. They had other sites in Britain. In fact, in London they had a whole area, it's called the Steelyard and it's roughly speaking, underneath Street Station today. There was a walled community. They had their warehouse on the river, they had a chapel, counting house, their little guild hall. They had wine cellars and kitchens and residential quarters. The jetties could be accessed directly by seagoing ships and kings. Lynn and London, other outposts in Britain, well, they were just a fraction of the similar sites right across Northern Europe, stretching cross the Baltic, deep into what is now Belorussia, or even Russia itself. If you squint a bit, they look a little bit like the beginnings of the colonies that places like Britain and Portugal and Holland were setting up in south and Southeast Asia. But the Hanseatic League wasn't quite like that. It might sometimes feel like a foreign kingdom. It could enter into negotiations, it could even make war. But it wasn't a power. It wasn't something that would become a nation state like the French or the Dutch. It was something very different. It was an influential, but I find it quite a mysterious medieval trading network. It was a loose collection of merchant elites in all these different places that worked together to secure trading privileges, to maximize their commercial trading, their financial advantages, to reduce internal barriers to trade, to collaborate and attempt to deal with foreign princes and kings. In this episode, I'm going to try and get to grips with the Hanseatic League. I'm going to see how this informal network of merchants evolved and thrived and became something slightly more solid, slightly more formal. Eventually, though declining, but leaving a legacy in many European cities and a legacy in organisations like Lufthansa. The German airline, its forebear in the 1920s, deliberately chose the name Lufthansa. It was going to be a Hansa of the air, a nod to the transnational commercial nature of that organization, its founders calling it, I think, to deliberately distance themselves from the big hierarchical empires that have just plunged the world into a terrible, terrible war, the First World War. What exactly was the original Hansa? What was the Hanseatic League? And why does it matter today? Well, to find out, I'm talking to Dr. Justinia Wubsmasovic. She's associate professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam and she's going to help me get to grips with the Hansa. Enjoy.

Santa (5:23)

T minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

Mrs. Claus's Younger Sister (5:27)

God save the King.

Santa (5:28)

No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again and lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Dan Snow (5:42)

Justina, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

Santa (5:45)

Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Dan Snow (5:47)

I guess, first of all, are leagues. Is this a sort of type of political organization that was sort of normal ish at the time, but that we've lost contact with? Or was this innovative? Was it highly unusual?

Santa (5:59)

So there were several leagues, city leagues, in the Middle Ages, but they were mostly for a certain purpose, for a certain time, and there was a foundational act. So in a sense, I think it's good to start by saying that the Hansa was not really a league. It was something totally different and it was something confusing, both to contemporaries and it is still to us now, both to scholars and I guess, to your listeners as well. So there is this English term, the Hanseatic League, which is widely known, but in a sense, I think we should call it the Hanse Defender Market, that it was a different type of beast.

Dan Snow (6:36)

Nice. It's like the old quote about the Holy Roman Empire. It's neither Holy Roman nor an empire. So the Hanseatic League was neither hanseatic nor a league.

Santa (6:43)

It was hanseatic in the sense that it was a collectivity, but it was not a league. So in 1469, the English king, Edward IV was also quite confused by it, and he tried to push the hanset. The hanseatic merchants who were there discussing the privileges and also their duties to define what they were. And they were quite good about in turning it around by stating what they were not, so that they, in a sense, they were stating that there were not any type of corporate body corporation, not a trading company. They were really kind of putting the emphasis of what they were not in order to avoid collective liability. So there was no common chest, so no common finances. You could say there was no common representative. There was no oath, which they swore to all of them. There was, as I mentioned, no foundational act. So it did not fit in the definitions of Roman law at that time. So it was a nice way to kind of avoid collective liability and state that if merchants from one city committed an act which displeased the English king, then they were not all liable to it. Hence, it was not a league.

Dan Snow (7:59)

Nice little bit amorphous, clever. It protects from litigation and, as you say, angry sovereign authorities. Tell me, what's the genesis? How and where does it emerge?

Santa (8:10)

Yes, there are several theories, in a sense, in how you should see the emergence of the Hanse. So all the research underlined that it was connected to the city of Lubeck, its foundation in the middle of the 12th century. But actually the Hanse is not so much about merchants being in a German city, but merchants going somewhere else. So in that sense, the fact that merchants from Cologne and also later Lubeck and other cities, ventures to London in the 12th century and established a guild hall, established an organization on the site. This is the beginning of the hanse. So merchants from cities around the Baltic and also the north coast, went to places like England, London, but also to Bruges, to Norway, to Russia, to Novgorod, but also to other places, later to Italy, Portugal, Iceland and so on. So it was very much about this outward movement connected to trade. This is the beginning of the hanse merchants going abroad and getting organized gradually.

Dan Snow (9:14)

So that's really interesting. So it's not driven by politics, strategy at home. It's what happens when groups of merchants with similar cultural and religious and geographical connections find themselves together in London or Portugal and think, should we group together here and deal with these crazy Englishmen? It's sort of. It's being formed almost on the periphery, and then it's somehow exported back home.

Santa (9:39)

Indeed. So this is very much this back and forth interaction of interests, privileges, opportunities which arise. So the hanse means, in a sense, a group of traders. There were several Hanses in the beginning, in the 12th century, but this one grew very much because of merchants coming from various cities who came together. So it's a huge geographical area, in a sense. If you see from the western part, what is now the Netherlands, there were several cities in Nahanze up to the eastern part of the Baltic. And then they found themselves in, for instance, what is now known as the steelyard in London. And they had to live together, trade together, and negotiate their rights with, for instance, the English king. And at a certain moment. So in the 12th and the 13th, and especially in the 14th century, they established rules, regulations, but also this kind of collective name of the hanse, the German Hanse. They got privileges in various places like Norway or Flanders or London, as merchants of the empire, merchants coming from the sea, cities, underlining the fact that it was very much the maritime trade, but also eventually the stern, the German hunse, whereby the German didn't mean the kind of Germanness which we associate perhaps with the word now, but it was the German law, the German urban law, and the German language. So dialects which were being spoken in those cities by those merchants.

Dan Snow (11:08)

Okay, so if you're sitting in London, there's a group of Hansa merchants, they're speaking German, they have a legal and linguistic integrity and that you trade with them. But then how does that work back in Lubeck, in these cities, for example, on the Baltic coast of Germany, how are they being forced to collaborate by the actions of their commercial entities they're sending abroad.

Santa (11:31)

There are guilds established of merchants going for instance to Bergen, to Norway, or to Stockholm, or indeed to Flanders. So it is a part of the organization within the city, which has also a huge impact on the city government. Richest merchants, the hanseatic merchants, are very often mayors or older men and have a huge influence on the politics. And they want to have their interests represented within the city, but also on a larger scale. So what you see from the middle of the 14th century is that representatives from these cities, for instance burgomasters, nerds or aldermen, go to very often Lubeck or another large hanseatic city, and they meet up for the so called hanseatic diets. So these are week long meetings where they eat together, they discuss various issues of trade, but also politics, privileges, the law, but also social issues, internal conflicts. They spend time together, they get to know each other. There are family ties which are very much apparent, and also internal alliances forged. So this is an internal institution, you could say, of the Hansa, those diets, the meetings. And then they also decide that they need to have a more firm organization of those settlements abroad. So this is very much an interaction between the two, the outside activities and the inside within the cities. These are the same people.

Dan Snow (13:03)

So, Justina, as someone who's not a medievalist, I'm bringing my terrible modern worldview. I'm totally acknowledging my context as a modern human being. I'm sort of struggling to understand, given the discussions that we are having in the 21st century, around the world, around the where power and sovereignty ought to lie, that transnational organizations, nativist groups who say, no, we should not be sharing our sovereignty with anyone. It's infringing our rights of self determination. Are any of these discussions presaged in this period? I mean, why is a city in northern Germany, Why are they prepared to send their representatives to Lubeck and have those people sort of try and hammer out legal and commercial issues in this kind of transnational group? Are these other cities sort of fine with that? Are they going to make money? Is there tension within that relationship?

Santa (13:56)

They do it because they see clear advantages of cooperating. So you see this kind of idea of a collectivity which surpasses the city, which is the kind of physical entity that they all know and they can relate to. But they have the idea of something which is indeed above it. There are no nations at the time, so it's trans regional. There are all kinds of political boundaries that they're crossing while discussing those things. But they still see the advantages for mobility of their merchants, of the sailors, of craftsmen who can go to another Hanseatic city and settle there with, for instance, easier access to burgesship rights. They discuss how information should flow. They give each other more access to information. They know that when they cooperate and indeed operate as a group of merchants and discussions with the English king, they will get more advantageous rights than other foreigners. They know that by coordinating laws, the rules and regulations of trade will be recognizable to each other and it will facilitate trade. They will know what to do when there are counterfeit goods being circulated within their system. So there are a host of advantages. And one of them, which I have been researching in the past years, is also conflict management. So they know, indeed, answering a question, there will be also internal conflicts between merchants, but also between cities. And you have to deal with them. They're part of life, so that you have to have ways to sometimes prevent them, but also effectively address them. So, for instance, in 1381, they had a rule that if two cities were in conflict with each other, then one or more cities in the vicinity was to send representative and try to mediate the conflict. They had several rules of what to do when individual merchants were in conflict with each other, for instance, about debt or inheritances, or about goods which never reached another city, for instance, because of piracy or adverse weather. They created several scripts, you could say how to address those situations. And that made it possible to, I think, imagine living in such a larger construct than just one city. They had a concept of an adapted concept of the common good. So before states and nations and what we know that also commonwealth, there was the medieval concept of the common good. So something which was to be advantages for the inhabitants of one city. Hansertz adapted this concept to the common cities and to the common merchants. So seeing it as something that they were to defend, they were to give access to all kinds of benefits to each other. So you see this very much creativity also on a conceptual level on how to operate it. So it's. I think it's a very pragmatic, creative approach and an awareness of the surroundings which surpass the immediate physical world in which you live.

Dan Snow (17:04)

Listen to Dan Snow's history. I'm learning all about the Hanseatic League. More coming up.

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Dan Snow (17:55)

I'm not.

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Nice.

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Dan Snow (19:52)

Is it quite flexible? Do you get towns and cities sort of crashing out if they profoundly disagree on the regulations around dried fish? Other examples of them just going, right, we're kind of out. And given that there isn't a kind of straight jacketed institutional framework, it means that presumably they can stretch the elastic, they can sort of come and go.

Santa (20:12)

Indeed, it's a very much a kind of flexible club membership without putting your name even in the club. So it's only in the 16th century that you have lists really of hanseatic cities before you grew into the hanse by sending your as a city, by sending your merchants abroad. Only in the 15th centuries, there started to be discussions who should actually count as a hanseatic city. There are several criteria which you could apply to the membership, but it's all fluid. And indeed, it also means that if you're no longer interested in trading as a handset, when the advantages disappear, that you kind of slowly make your exit and you just don't go to hanseatic diets, you don't send your emergence abroad, and effectively you cease to be a hanseatic city. But very often it wasn't a kind of official resignation. It's indeed an amorphous network organization, and you flow into it and you can flow out of it. There are very few examples of cities which really make a sense, we get out of here, or which are being kicked out of the organization.

Dan Snow (21:19)

So again, Justine, thank you so much. You've really helped me to understand this. And on the ground, talk to me about merchants, cargoes on the ground, or rather on the water, when you were enduring a period of being very much in the league, for example, let's just use that language. Your merchants would arrive in a port, presumably, and there was less friction, there's less paperwork, there's immediate protections offered, for example, I suppose, of cargoes. It just greases the cogs of this trade, does it?

Santa (21:46)

It does. And it's a huge network of families and friends. So part of the system was also that you spent quite a bit of time abroad in one of those outposts to learn the trade as a young merchant being sent by family members, but also as a craftsman. You could be sent to an uncle when you were a lubecker. You could send me to an uncle to Reval Tallinn to learn tricks of the trade there. There were marriage alliances also being forged, also during those hanseatic diets. So you knew people around. So that was also really part of this system. It was also a social network in that sense. And what always amazes me is when I read the primary sources, is how huge this mobility was, not only of the merchants themselves and sailors and craftsmen, but also family members, their wives, the children, youngsters traveling. There was a lot of traffic on the North Sea and the Baltic and also on the rivers. And the fact that you knew people around, that you knew how the legal system worked, that you understood the language, those dialects of the German, it really facilitated mobility and that you also very often knew the layout of the cities. Even so the law made it quite clear that there should be a marketplace, for instance, and a town hall. So you also had a kind of imaginary, an idea of how the city should look like, where you should go, which elements to find, which made this, well, quite often scary medieval world much more familiar to those people who moved.

Dan Snow (23:20)

About as the Hansa evolves. And you mentioned, for example, getting in a bit of a scrap with Edward iii. Do they embrace the tools, the language of a sovereign power? Do they develop a military force? They fight people? Do they enter hardcore negotiations with the English crown as sort of equals?

Santa (23:39)

They do. They very much do. So, for instance, they start wars with the Danish king. So on the whole, you could say that they prefer negotiations, diplomacy, because it's cheaper. These are merchants, after all. But if needed, they don't shy away from violence, from capturing ships, from blocking ports, from really outright warfare. So they do it several times and as a collectivity. And you see here also part of the organization, some of those cities are active in sending ships and people from the cities, and others contribute through taxes, through money, so that there's a whole system of internal negotiations, also how many ships should be sent. So they're very well versed in all the strategies and tactics of conflict, both on a large scale, like wars, but also in terms of legal systems and so on, what to employ in order to have an advantage. And I guess this is one of the reasons why this organization was so long lived. It's almost 500 years at a time where lots of changes happened in urban Europe. So I think this is quite a remarkable feat for cities which were under various rulers and undergoing all kinds of changes, crises, including the black day, we.

Dan Snow (25:00)

See in other types of polities that forms a political organization, that perhaps war and crisis can concentrate power into Individual hands. It can metastasize or evolve into sort of monarchies. Or do you get individuals that emerge that become the sort of talismanic, warlike leaders? Or is it always a more consensual, a more discursive sort of oligarchic system?

Santa (25:25)

It's quite a flat organization. So there is some hierarchy in terms of cities and that sense also some hierarchy in terms of people, Individuals who are leading those cities. But they don't really seek kind of permanent leadership. Even Lubeck is not really an official head of the hunt. They see it also as a bit of a burden, actually, responsibility. So they tried to divide those tasks. And it's only in the middle of the 16th century that the hanseatic cities decide that they need a kind of official who will represent them as a whole in discussions, for instance, with the English king or the Polish king. So there is a high English sudoman who is a syndic. And he gets quite a lot of tasks, a long list. But he's not really a very willing representative. He's complaining a lot that it's too much work. It's actually keeping him from his business. He's also a merchant. You would prefer it to see it as a kind of part time job. So most of those mayors, burgomasters, aldermen and so on. They represent the cities and negotiations and the hanseatic diets. But they are also merchants. And you really get the impression that they like this kind of multi task life that they have. They do not want to be focus on one, for instance, a political career. So it's the mix of those two. And this creates the situation that you don't really see such individuals who are pushing just for political power. It's more about economics, it's more about trade, about social and capital that they're building. So it's an interesting way of a more holistic approach to political life, I guess.

Dan Snow (27:12)

Is there ever a point when the Hansa could have evolved into a more imperial or nation state structure. And competed with the rise of. In the early modern England, Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, Sweden. Or is it just. It was just never that beast.

Santa (27:27)

So in the second half of the 16th century you really see those attempts of reorganization. So with the official that I mentioned, but also writing down rules more firmly, writing a list of members. So then they actually do try to become a league. They realize that the world is changing. So states are becoming much more powerful. Kings are more powerful. There's more of a distance between the city governments and kings. So they try to do it but it's in a sense, perhaps too late for it. Cities lose quite a bit of autonomy. So it's not really the timing to pursue such an adventure anymore. And we see also a change with trading routes. The Atlantic roost is opening up. So there's a lot of shit going on. The Baltic is much more of an area where the Dutch gain supremacy. So in a sense it's not their path. But I think what is really fascinating about the Hanse is that it shows a different route which did work for a long time. It's not statehood or nationhood, but a kind of collective living, acting for hundreds of years, where political boundaries are less important than the networks, the economic and the social and partly political networks that are being forged bottom up.

Dan Snow (28:48)

That's what I find so challenging and exciting and interesting about the Hansa. Because this is a time when the rest of Europe, nation states are evolving. The fiscal, military, state governments that can borrow money, build armies, build ships, fight an enemy. A culture of identity is building. Regional peoples are becoming French or becoming English or Scottish or even British. And the Hansa feels like it was just always on a very trajectory to that.

Santa (29:15)

It is. And perhaps if states didn't evolve the way they did, but cities stayed within their power and autonomy, then perhaps the whole of Europe would eventually be a Europe of cities. Which in a sense it is becoming in some aspects. Again, you see quite a lot of initiatives of cooperation between the cities. But there was not really the idea of that they were to govern Europe as a really one political bloc. It's a different philosophy and it's a different trajectory and exciting one. And in a sense it shows us it's not a given. This nationhood or statehood is one of the ideas we can have as people, as inhabitants of Europe or other parts of the world, of cooperation and solving problems, addressing conflicts. So it's not only within such top down rigid structures with indeed powerful men on top, but really also bottom up, smaller communities which see the value of cooperation and are perhaps realistic about the risks of cooperation and competition.

Dan Snow (30:19)

Was the hands are an alternative, quite a radical alternative model which did not survive the hard state power of the 17th century and at that period, but could have its time again. It's a completely different way of doing, of reimagining our political communities.

Santa (30:34)

It could be seen this way. So in a sense, the Hanses never totally ceased to exist. So in the 17th century, indeed, we have the last Hanseatic diet, which is seen as the end of the Hanse. But several of the cities continued to cooperate and continued to have this identity of cities which don't exist just within their own minds. And since the 1980s, you see this cooperation gaining traction again. So it's more on a cultural, also economic level that they're doing it. You have meetings of people, both officials, but also just inhabitants of those cities coming together for festivals and exchanging ideas, business ideas and culture. So it still exists, in a sense. The Hans have never ceased to exist. And perhaps it's a good reminder for us that there are all kinds of.

Dan Snow (31:22)

Possibilities when mayors of big cities announce sort of bilateral links between Berlin and London or New York. Is that the ghost of the Hansa? Is that smaller communities trying to break out from beneath the sort of armored shield of the nation state to try and forge commonality?

Santa (31:41)

You could see it, I guess, this way, but it's very often indeed bilateral. And if you make one step further, for instance, in issues like climate change or sometimes political alliances, and there are more cities who decide to join in, and we see this emerging on such topics, then it is the ghost, or the inspiration perhaps, of the Hanse. And some of those cities indeed, which are in Northern Europe, very much evoke this image. It's a positive image of cooperation, of what is possible.

Dan Snow (32:08)

And as you talk about legacy, the ghost is still there. Of course, the architectural landmarks, people will be very familiar with traveling across that area. Bremen, Lubeck, Hamburg, but also Lufthansa. So the name survives.

Santa (32:19)

Indeed. Indeed. So you see it also in names of. Of schools, for instance, here in Netherlands, and all kinds of products. So it evokes something which is sturdy, reliable, which has historical roots and which travels further than just one locality. So there's loads of positive connotations. Obviously, the Hansa was not only about positive aspects. There was, as we mentioned, war, and there were obviously also elites, which governs the cities. But overall, I think it is one of those fascinating and quite positive examples of historical social interaction to which we kind of willingly look back to and get inspired by Justinia.

Dan Snow (33:05)

I will put your website in the notes of this episode so people can check that out and check out more of your work.

Santa (33:10)

Thanks so much.

Dan Snow (33:12)

Thanks for coming on. Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before you go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube. And you can see me. You can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a tv. Or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.

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Santa. Santa, did you get my letter?

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He's talking to you.

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Br.

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I'm not.

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